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Comment by dartharva | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, but this reminds me of a recent incident. A friend came over to me asking for help transferring his WhatsApp chats from his old iPhone to his new Android phone. Turns out there is no official/practical way to do that, and he lost all hos chat and media records made across years (WhatsApp is the main mode of communication here, it's like opening up your official mail inbox one day and finding it completely empty).

He said he had lost them earlier as well, when he had migrated to an iPhone from an Android.

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That's actually kind of insane. Seamless transfer would take quite a high priority on the scale of things to implement, one would (and will) imagine. Transferring from and iPhone to an iPhone is so well-done that it actually adds to the pleasure of having a new phone.

This sounds like something a fanboy would say, but honestly it's just a really rather objective comparison of the functionality.

It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy. Even people who are aware that e2e encryption is only enabled on Telegram when you explicitly open a private chat soon abandon it because it lacks multi-device support which makes it easy to miss messages.

WhatsApp has always simplified their security model by not even attempting to support multiple devices (the desktop app communicates via your phone instead of directly with the servers). This greatly simplifies the server infrastructure for WhatsApp too, but there really is no good excuse for them not supporting portable local backup and restore after all these years.

For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.

It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy

Telegram has a feature to import all of your WhatsApp history, but I haven't tried it yet.

> It's interesting to watch consumer behaviour around Telegram's growth and how much value people place on preserving conversation history at the expense of security and privacy.

Persistent, multi-device conversation history might not seem valuable at first glance, but I can say that it's saved me a lot of trouble numerous times. In theory one could back up important messages from WhatsApp/Signal as they show up, but the problem is that the vast majority of the messages that end up being valuable at some point down the road are precisely those that seemed inconsequential in the moment. By the time you realize you need them they've been long deleted.

I'm not sure if this is a feature I got grandfathered into, but I've got WhatsApp set to back my messages up to Google Drive every week. On my Android phone, the setting is in settings -> chats -> chat backup.

It's something they still push aggressively - on Android. For iOS, I believe they use iCloud, and only iCloud; this means you can switch between Android handsets, or Apple handsets, but not Android to Apple (or vice-versa).

Note that this is based off what I've seen and heard from others, however - I've never actually owned an iPhone to test this.

And the backups are not inter-operable. A backup taken on Android cannot be transferred and restored on an iPhone, and vice versa.

Indeed, Telegram's appeal comes more from its superior feature set than privacy. It is very convenient to have everything backed up server-side and seamlessly run the same chat app on as many and as various devices as you wish.

>For your friend's sake, the app Anytrans claims to be able to backup and restore WhatsApp between platforms. I haven't tried it for that, but it might be worth checking out. It's part of Setapp.

We tried that and a number of other apps, even a paid one. It apparently only worked with older versions of WhatsApp.

It's because Whatsapp backs up to Google Drive and iCloud respectively. I have no idea why the backup format can't be agnostic of what it's backed up on. That would make the syncing logic agnostic as well.

Maybe it is. It’s encrypted though so could be hard to check.

I also lost all my WhatsApp history and data when I added WhatsApp to a new phone. Weird that it can only be active on one device.

The issue is how the data is backed up on Android vs iOS. In theory, if your iCloud or Google account is the same between devices then transfer to a new, same-OS device is trivial. It should "just work" in most cases. But WhatsApp does not provide its own backup service (which is fine with me) nor does it allow you to specify where to back it up to (which is not fine with me). If it did, then users switching between iOS and Android would have no (or little) trouble.

I used Wazzapmigrator to do this a couple of years ago

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